The Circle of Trust

Every day, we entrust our private and professional lives in these United States, and for most of the world actually, to basically these 6 companies, namely Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft and Starbucks. To a lesser extent, Snapchat, and Twitter. I have to add Uber and AirBnB as well. Facebook’s Instagram and WhatsApp will also be talked about under Facebook, as would YouTube under Google.

We do so mostly willingly, but mostly because of some vestigial connections still using that specific service or resource.

However, are these companies deserving of our trust, and our business, at all? Are they practitioners of ethical computing? Is our data safe with them? Can they be trusted in the future?

Over a series of blog posts, I will give you my thoughts on the firms listed above, and why I either have increased, stagnant, decreased, or zero engagement with them.

Believe me, some of these companies are not, and will NEVER be, in my Circle of Trust!

© 2002 – 2018, John Obeto for Blackground Media Unlimited

Follow @johnobeto

Will Skype 8.0 save the franchise?

Is Skype 8.0 going to be the resurrection of the Skype franchise?

The lack of traction for Skype so far during Microsoft’s ownership is rather pitiful.

From being the communications app for most of the world, across both industrialized and emerging nations, Skype has become largely forgotten.

In the interim, WhatsApp has conquered all.

To an outsider like me, the faults came down to a few things: unnecessary tedious onboarding, a hard-to-use UI, a craptastic user experience, and a seemingly user-unfriendly stance from Microsoft. Making international calls, a hallmark of Skype, became a severe chore!

To crown it all, further development on Skype visibly stopped. New features introduced into competing products weren’t even publicly roadmapped!

How bad was it?

Well, WhatsApp went from nowhere to being neck-and-neck with Skype for a minute, and now being in excess of 1 billion global users.

As for Skype, the last time user numbers were made known, it was at 300 million users. Back in 2016.

What makes this more infuriating, is that Microsoft is a well regarded company that is universally trusted to not abuse customer PIIs and data.

In these days of just-1% slightly-greater-than-1% user privacy awareness, I am pretty sure Microsoft can recapture, or at least, capture, a few tens of million new users if they keep their eyes on the prize.

Sadly, I’m not optimistic.

© 2002 – 2018, John Obeto for Blackground Media Unlimited

Follow @johnobeto